Standing at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on Monday afternoon, Donald Trump zeroed in on his closing message of the high-stakes midterm elections: it can take a long time to get rid of filth. Less than 24 hours before Americans headed to the polls, the US president staged a bizarre press conference in which he touted his troubled $14m renovation of the Washington DC landmark and blamed his predecessors for the algae that once bloomed in its water. Holding up a blown-up photo of the pool when it was covered in algae, Trump said: “This was in the Biden era … They just spend money after money after money.
Look, it’s not an easy thing. It forms easily … All you saw was dirt and filth and paper and everything else for years.” It was a head-scratching event just one day before election day, particularly as polls have shown that Americans aren’t too pleased with the president’s intense focus on renovation projects. Never mind that the reflecting pool project itself was badly botched and became an international joke earlier this year when Trump’s promise to turn the water “American flag blue” ended with a green algae takeover.
The press briefing was yet another sign that Trump was struggling to read the room, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he viewed “beautification of Washington” as one of his strongest legacies despite aides’ advice to focus on other matters. Trump has not listened to such guidance. On one tangent at the reflecting pool, he praised his legacy, saying he had achieved more in two years than any other administration in history.
It was unclear how the White House would be marking the occasion. On Tuesday morning, as polls opened nationwide, Trump turned up on the rightwing Fox News network with a surprise announcement: he would end military aid to Israel at the end of the year, he claimed. It was a position more in tune with the views of voters, with a Quinnipiac poll in September finding nearly half of Americans believed the US was too supportive of Israel.
The president also said the quiet part out loud: he was sick of Democrats hammering him on the issue, citing the effective messaging of Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan who has criticized military aid to Israel. Trump said “the left” had used the $4bn figure as a “signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen”. It’s a bad talking point,” he said.
By Tuesday evening, as polls began to close, the president was angrily ranting about Fox, the leading conservative news network that he long considered his ally, but which has increasingly drawn his ire. All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me – My numbers are better than they have ever been.” Within an hour, results started pouring in: major wins for Democrats in Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
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